Christopher Whiteside MBE is the Conservative County Councillor for the Egremont North & St Bees Division of Cumbria County Council. The division includes St Bees, Bigrigg, Wood End, most of Moor Row, the Western part of the Mirehouse area of Whitehaven, and surrounding countryside.
Chris lives and works in Copeland with his wife and family.
Chris is a former member of Copeland Borough council, and an Honorary Alderman of the City and District of St Albans.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

If the last election had been fought under another electoral system ...

There is an excellent post by "The Screaming Eagles" on Political Betting this morning in response to a suggestion that Tim Farron and Jeremy Corbyn are supposedly in talks for an arrangement to make a joint promise of electoral reform for the 2020 General Election.

Aside from the little matter that, as he points out,

"I’m astounded given Corbyn’s dire polling, why the Lib Dems (or anyone else) would want to form an alliance/understanding with a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour Party on any topic."
it is worth reminding ourselves what various election systems might have produced in 2015, an election in which the Conservatives and UKIP between them received about half the votes cast.

The electoral reform society who produced the numbers in the table below thinks that

* The AV system rejected by the people in a referendum in 2011 would have given the Conservatives a larger majority.

* Both STV and List PR would have meant that the nearest thing to a stable government would probably have been a Conservative and UKIP coalition.

I can see that it is rational for UKIP supporters to prefer that outcome to what happened, but would anyone else? Really?

1 comment:

Changing the method by which we elect "representatives" does not solve the problem. It never could have when the crux of the problem is Representative democracy. Its like trying to cure measles using make up.